


Year of the Sheep

by Poinsettia



Series: Seven Years [7]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Alternate Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-17 13:56:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8146595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poinsettia/pseuds/Poinsettia
Summary: Seven Years is a series of vignettes that aims to show the development of Wufei and Treize's relationship during the first seven years following the end of the war, with Treize as the winner. Each vignette is titled according to a year of the Chinese calendar.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The _Gundam Wing_ anime series is property of H. Yatate, Y. Tomino  & Bandai. No money is being made out if this work.

Sun, wind, earth, water. Everything so bright. Cheerfulfaces, flying kites, colorful flowers, sparkling fountains. Everything so alive. People everywhere without a worry. Children playing knowing no horrors. It’s so impossibly perfect, so unbelievably real. I never knew life could be like this. My life was never _anything_ like this. There were always shadows, I was always cold. Now, though, now… It’s like seeing for the first time a color movie after an eternity of black and white images. Like the first three-dimensional picture after an era of flat prehistoric drawings. Just that shocking, that incomprehensible, that liberating. How come never before have I felt so free?

All those years ago, I was fighting for freedom. But isn’t it ironic? That I didn’t know what freedom tasted like? And yet I (they) was (were) fighting (died) for it. 

_Peace._

Such an abstract concept. I wonder if we could have won had our aspirations been less metaphysical. This is such a physical world, after all. Maybe it’s only logical that it had no place for our desires. Or for us. The nameless ones, the numbers. An impossible equation in the mathematics of life: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 13

In the end, it all leads to you, Treize. 

You were our beginning and our end. Their and my shaper. For I’m nightly made and remade by you, experiencing through your touch my perpetual destruction and renewal. Because, unmerciful, none of the deaths you inflict on me is mortal, so I can yet die with you a dozen times every night. 

During the last seven years, I have come to memorize your ceiling, and the feel of your bed sheets, and the weight of your body, and the wrinkles around your closed eyes, and the voiceless commands of your hands. You still frown when the collar of my shirt reveals my old scars. And you’re extra careful to repeat a thousand times: “Wufei, Wufei, Wufei”, when after a social function I’m dizzy with being called a fake. 

You take me hunting, and place a gun in my hands, and it is not a test because we both know I won’t fail it. And you have given Quatre’s videophone number a safe-conduct into the private line of our house. 

And each year, with the punctuality of an Englishman, a plane-ticket appears on my desk so that I can go visit my friends. When I do, I’m careful not to bring them roses, and I don’t feel much like a traitor any longer, because someone has to weed old graves and plant fresh flowers. Nothing is forgotten. That is my job: to remember for the sake of humanity. 

Yours, Treize? Yours is to make them forget.

The cashier finishes ringing up my account and hands me a paper bag full of vegetables. I pay him and walk down the street-market to where a car is waiting for me. The driver takes the bag and places it with others similarly filled inside the trunk. I briefly inspect them to make sure I have bought everything I need. It wouldn’t do to find I missed something in the middle of preparing dinner. Treize would tease the life out of me and the cook would see it as an excuse to get back her kitchen. Women. I don’t understand why she makes such fuss? I only make use of it once in a while, when I’m in the mood to play dutiful lover. But, no, I don’t seem to be missing anything. Satisfied, I make a signal to the driver that we can go. He closes the door of the car after I have climbed in and takes his place at the front.

“Where do you wish to go next, Master Chang?” he asks me. 

I look out the window to the lively world beyond. 

_‘Half is what we are, the other half what we think. In the stream, one half reaches the shore, another sinks.’_ (*) As for me, I have already sunk... and have already reached my shore.

“I think is time to go home,” I tell him.

**End of _Seven Years_**

**Author's Note:**

> (*) Fernando Pessoa, 'Oda 110', _Odas de Ricardo Reiss, (1935-1994)_. My translation.


End file.
